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As means of a background, I have been in the security field, specifically the pro-active testing (penetration testing) side of security for over a decade. As part of my role I would present at public and private conferences, helping to educate organizations about the benefits of pen testing or helping to educate pen testing teams about the latest techniques.

I say all of this in order to communicate that I would grade myself as having an above average knowledge of the security space and significant familiarity with commonly used terms in the industry. So when I recently took a product manager roles at Onapsis and was told I would have to learn about SAP and the security and risk implications around SAP in the enterprise I smiled and thought “well, I guess I know what I am doing the first couple of days”. As it turns out SAP is a world unto itself, with a lot of history and complexity.

This blog is the second in a series that documents the self-education that I have been undertaking as I learn about SAP, assessing the security of a SAP system and then implementing secure practices.

As I mentioned in my first post in this series, the typical reaction of a business when asked about the security of their SAP systems is to refer to the SoD checks they do. That is the testing they do to ensure proper Segregation of Duties is enforced; which is, the system has the logic in place to prevent fraud – so the person who submits an expense report cannot approve it as well, for example.

Given 10 years of dealing with buffer overflows, ClientSide attacks, SQLi and numerous other ways to exploit weaknesses in how systems have been coded and implemented, I was more than a little surprised to learn that the testing of the underlying SAP applications and their configuration was not common practice.

There are numerous presentations and articles online that talk about the day SAP released 500 notes; and those that talk about the current rate at which SAP releases their notes. Suffice it to say that SAP is a large and mature technology that has the typical amount of issues of any large and mature technology.

As means of a background, I have been in the security field, specifically the pro-active testing (penetration testing) side of security for over a decade. As part of my past role, I would present at public and private conferences, helping to educate organizations about the benefits of pen testing or helping to educate pen testing teams about the latest techniques.

I say all of this in order to communicate that I would grade myself as having an above average knowledge of the security space and significant familiarity with commonly used terms in the industry. So when I recently took a product manager role at Onapsis and was told I would have to learn about SAP and the security and risk implications around SAP in the enterprise I smiled and thought “well, I guess I know what I am doing the first couple of days”. As it turns out SAP is a world unto itself, with a lot of history and complexity.

I know that more and more ‘traditional’ security professionals are being asked to evaluate the security posture and risk of a business’s SAP system; which makes sense as SAP typically runs the most critical processes and workflows for an organization, as well as housing the most important data. Given the amount of time and effort it is taking me to learn SAP I thought it would be beneficial to publish a little resource for other professionals making the same jump.

So, SAP? For those like me who need to know what an acronym stands for it is Systems, Applications and Products in data processing, also it is never said as a single word, but spelled out S-A-P. It started in and is still based in Germany and according to Wikipedia has a revenue of over 16 billion Euro in 2012 – so not a small company by any stretch of the imagination.

Mobile security is definitely a hot topic in our industry. However, it’s quite hard to find people talking about mobile security beyond managing/securing the device itself. Most industry solutions are focused in deploying a secure BYOD strategy and ensuring the devices cannot be exploited with malware.

While this approach is highly important, I have found it difficult to find solutions that actually look at the security of the backend servers that are used by such mobile devices. These servers vary from simple Apache, IIS or Tomcat application servers with Web mobile apps to highly proprietary components.

If your company is using SAP mobile applications in you employees’ tablets or smartphones, then you have SAP servers exposed to the Internet to serve such devices, which already puts them in a more risky situation (Internal threats mentioned on previous blog). With 6000+ customers already using them and being one of the fastest growing product line for SAP AG, it’s highly likely that you are or soon will be empowering your users with SAP-branded apps.

In this scenario, an attacker only needs to perform an external scan to discover such components, and – be sure about it – he is not limited to the functionality that the SAP mobile app is providing your users. He can interface with such SAP servers with a variety of attack tools and try to exploit vulnerabilities in them. The result? He may be able to compromise your entire SAP infrastructure, remotely over the Internet.

This was a growing concern in many of our leading customers, and I’m glad to announce that we responded quickly: Onapsis X1 is now the first-and-only product in the market equipped to detect & assess vulnerabilities affecting SAP Mobile Platforms (Sybase Unwired Platforms), SAP NetWeaver Gateway and SAP Fiori apps.

We are going to be showcasing this new version at booth #231 during the Black Hat Conference this month in Las Vegas as well as hosting a 2 day SAP Security In-Depth training.

Remember that your mobile apps are probably connecting to a backend system in your network. If it’s SAP, we got you covered.